‘Seven Psychopaths’ Deserves a Criterion-Like Treatment

One of the most underrated and overlooked movies of last year is now out on Blu-ray.

Irish playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh’s strange and clever dark comedy Seven Psychopaths sank like a stone at the box office, just like his last effort, In Bruges. But that one turned into a cult hit on home video, so I’m expecting the same thing for the similarly twisted Seven Psychopaths.

Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken are laugh-out-loud funny as dog-nappers who become intertwined with fledgling screenwriter Colin Farrell, but a plot synopsis beyond that doesn’t do the film justice.

Seven Psychopaths tests the boundaries of narrative coherency, flying gloriously off the rails as it plays gleefully with genre expectations. There’s no way to predict what’s going to happen next, and it’s absolutely thrilling.

In my original review, I praised Rockwell and Walken, both overlooked for acting awards this year, by saying: “Rockwell and Walken are the standouts here, both riotously funny but in completely different ways. Rockwell is a manic mess, constantly running at the mouth and serving as some sort of stand-in for the tastes of the mainstream action crowd. Walken is his calm, reasoned counterpoint. He delivers deadpan line after deadpan line with the world-weariness of a man who’s lived a life that would make most crime movie fans blush.”

Now here’s where I start to get angry.

A movie this complicated, this layered, and this far-out absolutely deserves a full-on DVD/Blu-ray package chock full of informative extras that illuminate the themes from the film.

Unfortunately, what Sony Pictures gives us is a bunch of tossed-off interview snippets and EPK material, most of which you can probably find on YouTube. ACTUALLY, YOU CAN. SO … just to prove how lame they are, I’ve embedded them all below. It’s all marketing materials. There’s a two-minute featurette, an interview with Colin Farrell, one with Woody Harrelson, a 2-minute bit on the film’s locations, a silly attempt to market the movie (which I’ll agree is unmarketable, and gloriously so) using the Internet “cat craze,” and something called “Layers,” a one-minute clip package under a Rockwell beatbox beat that has no clear point other than to be annoying.